There are too many holes in the certified totals from the Iowa caucuses to know for certain who won, but Rick Santorum wound up with a 34-vote advantage.

Results from eight precincts are missing — any of which could hold an advantage for Mitt Romney — and will never be recovered and certified, Republican Party of Iowa officials told The Des Moines Register on Wednesday.

GOP officials discovered inaccuracies in 131 precincts, although not all the changes affected the two leaders. Changes in one precinct alone shifted the vote by 50 — a margin greater than the certified tally.

The certified numbers: 29,839 for Santorum and 29,805 for Romney. The turnout: 121,503.

It’s not a surprise that the ultra-thin gap of eight votes on caucus night didn’t hold up, but it’s tough to swallow the fact that there will always be a question mark hanging over this race, politics insiders said.

The news comes at a pivotal point — two days before the South Carolina primary, the third state to vote in the nominating process, and just before another big debate tonight. Romney is under attack from all sides, and the other GOP hopefuls are struggling to convince voters that they are viable alternatives to the former Massachusetts governor.

“It will be a story and Santorum will seize upon it, but it won’t change the current political narrative,” said John Stineman, an Iowa Republican operative.

Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, is still battling Newt Gingrich, and to a lesser degree Rick Perry, for the conservative base, Stineman said.

Even if Santorum had been the big headline on Jan. 4 as the Iowa winner, “it certainly wouldn’t have changed how New Hampshire came out, nor (Romney’s) status as the national front-runner,” Stineman said.

Romney has already soaked up the benefits of his declared win. With the Iowa caucuses, the prize is the immediate media attention and the credibility bestowed on the winner. But history now has an asterisk: It’s not clear whether Romney is the first Republican since 1976 to win in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

Over the last two weeks, the vote total seesawed wildly — just as it did on caucus night.

“When I called Governor (Terry) Branstad to update him (Tuesday) night before I went to bed, I told him I could not tell him who was going to come out on top of the certified results,” GOP Chairman Matt Strawn told the Register Wednesday morning.

“Despite what had been in the media, it really was, even the night before the deadline, it really was too close to call,” he said.

Who led depended on the luck of the draw of which precincts rolled in next, said Chad Olsen, the party’s executive director.

Romney was ahead by 51 votes the weekend after the caucuses, Olsen said. On Tuesday night, Romney was up 24 votes. Then at noon Wednesday, Santorum was up by only three votes. The six precincts that happened to come in next boosted Santorum to a 34-vote lead.

At 5 p.m. Wednesday — the deadline for volunteers to get their official “Form E” paperwork with caucus results to Republican Party of Iowa headquarters in Des Moines — the back-and-forth ended with 1,766 precincts certified out of 1,774.

So who won the Iowa caucuses?

“I can’t speculate without documentation from the missing eight,” Strawn said. “The comments I made at 1:30 a.m. Jan. 4 congratulating both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum still apply. I don’t think the certified vote totals take anything away from either Governor Romney or Senator Santorum.”

All 99 counties turned in their documented results — Howard County was the last and arrived by fax Wednesday — but party officials had to hunt down dozens of missing precincts.

As far as party leaders could tell, no Form Es ever existed for the eight missing precincts, Olsen said. There’s no chance those eight will certified, he said.

“It’s a split decision,” Olsen said.

Party officials saw no significant shifts until Friday, when Fayette County figures rolled in, Strawn said.

In the tabulation room on caucus night, campaign representatives agreed they were comfortable with the numbers showing an eight-vote win for Romney. Everyone promised that as changes flowed in during certification, they would not disclose those vote counts or talk about them with reporters, agreeing that the back-and-forth would be misleading, Olsen said.

Party officials confidentially told the Santorum campaign that Fayette County had lifted him by 99 votes.

On the campaign trail in South Carolina on Friday, Santorum crowed that he might have won Iowa.

Meanwhile in Iowa, the counting grew more complicated.

More than 100 of the Form Es didn’t comply with the party’s instructions.

The precinct chair and precinct secretary were both to sign the results verified by witnesses on caucus night. But results for some precincts came in on pieces of paper other than the official forms. Many more had only one signature, or the wrong signature (say, from a county chair). Another 18 documents had no signatures at all.

All were accepted, party officials said.

“Some are technically perfect in every way, and some are in a gray area, but we erred on the side of inclusion,” Strawn said. “If the campaigns want to make it an issue, they can, but I want to best reflect how Iowans voted on the night of Jan. 3.”

In Fayette County, four of the Form Es were signed by the same two people — Irene Iben, a precinct secretary who backed Gingrich, and Janet Wissler, a precinct secretary who caucused for Perry.

Wissler told the Register on Wednesday that the four precincts — Oelwein 1, 2, 3 and 4 — voted as a group. The Fayette County GOP chairwoman “probably handed them to me and told me to sign them,” Wissler said. “It was the next day.”

All Form Es were supposed to be signed on caucus night, Olsen said.

The muddled results make it impossible to declare a winner, Strawn said.

“The numbers are what they are, and everybody will have an opportunity to inspect the forms from start to finish. This has been as open an electoral process as you’ll find,” he said.

Politics watchers said an accurate caucus count is important to the credibility of the event, but it would be unfair for anyone to spin the new outcome as embarrassing for Iowa.

“It’s not Iowa’s fault that the race was so close,” said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst from Virginia.

The ambiguous certified numbers do seem to take some of the luster off the event, but even if the Hawkeye State gets a brief black eye from inconclusive results, the press and the candidates will be back next time for the caucuses in 2016, Kondik said.

Stineman said: “Even with some changes in the numbers, the Republican Party of Iowa ran a better reporting process than a lot of states do for their official elections.”

Bush-Gore 2000 in Florida was similarly tight, although the importance of that contest was on an entirely different level, Stineman said. That race was so close that election officials, even with the benefit of voting machines and trained auditors, couldn’t decide who won. It took the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve it.

The caucuses, in contrast, are a loose process in which colored slips of paper are gathered in cardboard boxes and plastic buckets and counted by hand as witnesses gather around — about as precise as choosing a class president.

One Democratic political operative, Jerry Crawford of Des Moines, said no party, Democrat or Republican, can protect against a race this close.

“If New Hampshire had been an eight-vote margin, they would be arguing about that for weeks, too. Matt Strawn did a fine job presiding over this process, and then the gods dealt him a bad final hand.”

Strawn explained why the certification took longer than he’d hoped: Not every county filed complete information. “Our staff played the role of Columbo, going around the state trying to track down wayward precinct results — and with few exceptions very successfully,” he said.

EXAMPLES OF COUNTIES WITH VOTE COUNT CHANGES
Here are examples of three counties where the vote totals changed between caucus night and the certified totals.

The biggest shift happened in Fayette County. In two cases there, Rick Santorum gained more votes than the entire gap in the statewide certified total.

FAYETTECaucus night tally: Mitt Romney 241, Rick Santorum 174Problem: Typos in two precincts. A reported 54 votes in Illyria township should have been 5, and 54 votes in Oelwein’s third precinct should have been 4. Another wrinkle: Four precincts’ Form Es were signed by the same two people when party instructions call for individual precinct leaders to sign each form.Certified result: Santorum 172, Romney 136

APPANOOSECaucus night tally: Santorum 174, Romney 87Problem: Three typos. The Union precinct was listed as 32 for Santorum when it was actually 3. In Washington-Wells, 23 votes for Romney should’ve been 2. And in the Walnut precinct, a reported 6 votes for Santorum should have been 7.Certified result: Santorum 146, Romney 67. (The changes didn’t alter the winner in this county, which got press coverage when a voter noticed a discrepancy in the reported results. Santorum still had the advantage, but it shrank.)

BUENA VISTACaucus night tally: Santorum 154, Romney 124Problem: Two typos. The Albert City-Fairfield-Coon precinct went from 22 to 35 for Santorum, and from 2 to 8 for Romney. The Sioux Rapids-Lee precinct took away one vote for Santorum, from 6 down to 5.Certified result: Santorum 166, Romney 130

Nailing down caucus results has proved troublesome
Iowa’s caucuses have a history of incomplete, imperfect results.

After years of criticism, Republican Party officials turned over the counting to media organizations in 1988. Newspapers and television networks declined to continue that arrangement after 2004, and the GOP has been on its own for two cycles now.

A review of results reporting over the years show a process that is getting better, but still is not flawless.

It appeared on caucus night that George H.W. Bush scored an upset victory, beating Ronald Reagan by as much as 6 percentage points.

But computer problems kept 165 mostly rural precincts in which Reagan figured to do especially well from being included in the tally. Two days later, the party’s re-examination showed a 2 percentage-point margin for Bush. CBS News had it even closer, with Reagan leading by less than 1 percent.

The final numbers represented 94.4 percent of the precincts — 142 precincts never reported their results or didn’t hold caucuses, according to Drake University political science professor Dennis Goldford, co-author of “The Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event.”

1984: The News Election Service, funded by a consortium of national TV networks and the Associated Press, was created to gather raw vote totals rather than the delegate equivalents that party officials had provided since 1972. But Democratic Party officials refused to cooperate, and the news service managed to tally only 74 percent of precincts.

The party’s own counts proved unreliable: Party leaders were sure Walter Mondale had come in first, but they weren’t certain where other candidates had finished. Many votes were never turned in.

1988: Democrats were still at odds with the news media. Questions were again raised about the validity of the News Election Service results, which were based on just 70 percent of Democratic precincts, Goldford wrote.

Republicans, however, continued to work with the News Election Service to ensure accuracy and legitimacy, and Bob Dole’s nearly 13 percentage-point lead was based on 98 percent of the GOP precincts counted.

1992: Again, Democrats refused to share caucus vote totals, only delegates won by each candidate. The GOP didn’t hold a vote to save its sitting president, George H.W. Bush, any embarrassment from challenger Pat Buchanan.

1996: Republicans decided to do no official party count. Instead, the tabulating was handled by the Voter News Service, which replaced the News Election Service. Still, some GOP candidates thought the VNS results showing Dole first and Buchanan second were flawed.

2008: Republicans handled their own count and experienced some data entry problems. Mike Huckabee won, with Mitt Romney in second. Democrats reported a win for Barack Obama, with John Edwards and Hillary Clinton nearly tied for second.

2012: Iowa Republican officials moved their tabulating center from party headquarters to an undisclosed location to ward against hackers and protesters. County officials reported the precinct votes by phone with live call-takers or logged in to a security-code-protected website.